THE CRASH OF FLIGHT 800: CRISIS MANAGEMENT;How to Inform the Families: Is Quick Better Than Right?

In the aftermath of the destruction of Trans World Airlines Flight 800, a debate has been rekindled about whether American airline companies act quickly enough to notify the families of victims of air disasters.

Some relatives of passengers on the flight that left New York Wednesday night for Paris complained that T.W.A. was too slow to confirm who had been on board. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani criticized T.W.A. sharply and repeatedly, accusing airline officials of leaving families in doubt too long, and then of lying to him about the reasons for their slow response.

The upper management of T.W.A. incompetently handled the notification process for the families," the Mayor said Friday on his weekly radio program.

But airline officials contended that they had acted responsibly. They said that to avoid mistakes, they had to painstakingly compare passenger lists with boarding passes.

Sherry Cooper, the president of T.W.A.'s Flight Attendents Union, said 53 T.W.A. employees had gone down with Flight 800.

"I would like to make a personal statement to Mayor Giuliani," she said "Now is not the time to make this tragedy a personal agenda or a political career. It serves absolutely no useful purpose; it does more harm than good. We at T.W.A. will welcome a full review of our performance in this incident. A 30-second sound bite is not the appropriate forum for that review. The families of the victims, including our own families, deserve better than that."

The dozens of T.W.A. workers standing with her behind the microphones applauded.

Criticism like that leveled at T.W.A. has been heard in recent years from relatives of victims of other airline crashes.

Some relatives of people who died in the bombing of Pan American Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, told a House subcommittee that they got the news from messages the airline left on their answering machines, telling them to call back if they had questions.

The sense among many families that various airlines have been insensitive, if not callous, after air disasters has coalesced. Associations of relatives of victims in 10 major air crashes have formed the National Air Disaster Alliance and Foundation, which has been lobbying for a system that would give Federal officials the power to call in the Red Cross to deal with families immediately after a crash.

Vicki Cummack, the president of an association of families that lost relatives in the Pan Am bombing, said there is an inherent conflict of interest after an air disaster, with families of victims left "in the hands of the people who killed them."

Some family members noted with frustration that Congress passed a bill in 1990 requiring American airline companies to provide a passenger manifest to the State Department within three hours of an air disaster outside the United States.

The law would not have applied to the explosion of T.W.A. Flight 800, which occurred just a few miles off Long Island. But Mr. Giuliani and some relatives of victims insisted that, by any reasonable standard, T.W.A. officials had taken too long to complete a formal passenger list and notify relatives. Richard Penzer of Lawrence, L.I., whose sister, Judy, was on the flight, said that his mother had not been notified by the airline that her daughter had died in the explosion. "We must have called a hundred times," Mr. Penzer said.

Mr. Giuliani said in a lengthy interview on Friday night that T.W.A. "did not tell me the truth on several occasions."

The Mayor arrived at Kennedy International Airport soon after learning about the incident on Wednesday night. Around midnight, he said, city officials began asking the airline for the list of people who had been scheduled to board. City officials finally got one, but from officials of the Port Authority.

Mr. Giuliani said that municipal officials then asked the airline for the boarding slips, to confirm who had actually gotten on the plane. He said it "should take about 15, 20 minutes" to compare the boarding slips with the manifest, and then begin notifying family members.

But airline officials said that the records had been taken by the police or the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Mayor said. Both the police and F.B.I. denied that they had been given the records, he said.

At about 4:30 or 5 A.M. the next morning, the Mayor said, the president of T.W.A., Jeffrey H. Erickson, told him that the airline had given a complete passenger list to the National Transportation Safety Board, the lead agency that investigates accidents. But a few hours later, Mr. Giuliani said, the head of the safety board told him that the agency did not have a list, and that if it did, it would not prevent its release.

In the end, the Mayor said, city officials did not receive a complete list until nearly 5 P.M. Thursday, or about 20 hours after the explosion. "I assure you that if we had not put relentless pressure on them, they would still be doing it."

"There is no reason in the world why the airline can't do this in an hour or two," the Mayor said. "To have hundreds and hundreds of people in torture doesn't make sense."

When asked at a news conference on Friday about the Mayor's criticism, Mr. Erickson, the T.W.A. president, side-stepped the issue, saying, "I'm very appreciative of the Mayor and his trauma response team.

"Obviously, they are all in New York City. Our trauma response team is from all over our system, and came in. So the Mayor and his people really supplemented our own efforts, which are now full scale."

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A version of this article appears in print on July 21, 1996, on Page 1001023 of the National edition with the headline: THE CRASH OF FLIGHT 800: CRISIS MANAGEMENT;How to Inform the Families: Is Quick Better Than Right?. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe